Tag: tsukimi

A week after involving Hose, Cherry, and Tsukimi, the library has been saved. But while the more bustling atmosphere doesn’t bother Pansy, continuing to deal with Hose does. Joro hasn’t figured out a way to help her in this matter, so reaches out to Tampopo.

He’s learned through Asunaro that she’s in love with Hose, and thus worked hard to get Pansy a boyfriend so she’d be off the board. She’s too busy with baseball to visit the library after school, so advises Joro to ask Pansy out immediately.

Joro still isn’t emotionally equipped to do that, and so the problem lingers and becomes more complicated. We learn that Sun-chan’s exchange with Pansy last week was to ask her to be his girlfriend if his team made it to Koushien. In the library, when Joro asks to talk to Pansy she tells him she’s accepted Sun’s offer, to the shock of both Hose and Joro. She also tells Joro to stay away from her…”for a while.”

When Joro meets with Sun-chan, his best friend confirms what Pansy said, adding that he’s been a good best friend thus far, and now it’s Joro’s turn to return the favor and “do what he’s supposed to do.” Tsubaki overhears this and grasps the situation, but Joro is still lost in the weeds.

He stays away from the library, working at Tsubaki’s family’s restaurant, he still gets to interact with her, Himawari, Cosmos, Asunaro, and yes, even Sasanqua (who works up yet more courage to offer support to him, but just can’t quite help herself from going Full Tsundere whilst around him).

Joro rightly considers this to still be a pretty sweet deal, and resigns himself to a Pansy-less life. The thing is, Joro read Pansy wrong in this case, and the ever-reliable Tsubaki is there to set him straight. Pansy may have called him a useless nuisance, but she said that and agreed to Sun’s offer to protect him from getting caught up in her problem.

It’s Joro’s choice whether to get caught up, and the “for a while” (rather than “forever”) was a small SOS to invite Joro to choose to help her despite the trouble. And he does just that, strolling into the library as the arrogant jerk Pansy fell in love with in the first place, just as Hose asks her out in the even Sun’s team doesn’t make the cut.

As expected, the unflincingly loyal Cherry and Tsukimi run interference for Hose, but Joro powers through, and Pansy lets him speak. Joro devises a challenge to Hose, giving each girl one of the excess barrettes Tampopo acquired while trying to win his heart. The barrettes represent votes: the girls should give the barrette to the guy they think should be with Pansy.

Predictably, this backfires for Joro, and he’s the only one who didn’t see it coming. Cosmos, Himawari, and Asunaro give their barrettes to Hose, not Joro, and take the opportunity to profess their love for Joro. Since he gave them the choice, none of them are willing to be runner-up. Cherry and Tsukimi actually inspired them to strive for love and friendship.

Hose also rescinds his friendship with Joro, as he cannot be friends with anyone who would keep him from Pansy. That’s kind of false equivalence, however, as it’s Pansy who doesn’t want to be with Hose, and has made it pretty clear! If Pansy and Joro love each other and want to be a couple the two of them need to break some hearts, full stop.

Hose, Cosmos, Himawari, and Asunaro need to be rejected in no uncertain terms. Sadly, so does Sasanqua, while Joro and Pansy need to clearly define their relationship going forward as one of a boyfriend and girlfriend. There can be no more half-measures creating hope for the others.

Will they take those difficult steps in the series-concluding OVA? One can hope. Joro wants to “leave all rom-coms in the dust.” One surefire way for Oresuki to stand out from a crowd is to have an unambiguous final couple.

Yamada’s Brother’s Impression of how high school girls should dress in the Summer. Actual bust size may vary.

Re-Kan! wraps with a multi-stage slice-of-life episodes, starting with a trip to a theme park (or is it amusement park? I believe Amaburi pointed out the difference). The usual gang of Amami’s classmates come, and Yamada’s often inappropriate brother also tags along.

Finally, Kana and Kyouko surprise Amami by inviting any and all of Amami’s ghosts friends who want to come. Amami also meets a new ghost, or rather an old one who helped her reunite with her dad when she got lost at the park as a small girl. In return, the ghost girl asked Amami to come back one day with her friends. Amami may have forgotten, but she still honored the request, and fun is had by all.

From the theme park the gang has a sleepover at Amami’s place, complete with dinner, fireworks, Old Maid, and the guys sleeping out in the yard, per propriety. (The episode cuts to their classmate Yoshida several times, not participating in all these boilerplate summer activities so he can presumably draw a manga, unaware he’s missing out on some great material for said manga).

Narumi isn’t as scared of spending the night in Amami’s ghost-filled house as she thought, but she still can’t sleep. Turns out no one is asleep, but only resting their eyes, but before they can agree to pull an all-nighter, Narumi dozes off thanks to Amami holding her hand, the same way Amami’s father used to hold hers when she couldn’t sleep.

With that fun-filled Summer day, Re-Kan comes to a close, proving you can stay upbeat and heartfelt in a supernatural anime and still deliver creative, consistent laughs, both of the high- and low-brow variety.

Hibiki is lost and anxious without her sixth sense, and it puts her in the nurse’s office, and eventually she stops coming to school altogether. When her living friends pay her a visit, her dad says she’s still processing the shock, and doesn’t want to face those she worried so much.

Narumi doesn’t give a hoot what Hibiki wants, as long as its so selfless it hurts her. When she hears Hibiki isn’t eating, she whips up the same tamagoyaki he and Hibiki made for lil’ Yuuki way back when (nice continuity!); a recipe she knows to be Hibiki’s mom’s. And then she jams it down Hibiki’s throat.

Enough’s enough; Narumi’s not going to let Hibiki stop living just because she can’t see or hear the dead anymore. She drags Hibiki out of her gloomy house to show her that the good she’s done stretches far beyond the dearly departed. I for one love how the other friends sit back and let Narumi do her thing; she’s always had the closest bond to Hibiki, tsundereness aside, and it’s great to see her in action.

Narumi and Hibiki cross paths with numerous such people Hibiki helped connect with their departed loved ones, and had a positive impact on their lives, from the teachers who married and are now expecting, to the Kogal’s mother and the crabby old man. But those were just coincidences, Narumi really wanted to show what making those eggs for Yuuki did; he’s now a tough, happy little brother to his baby sister Kyouka, whose name means “echoing song” and shares a character with Hibiki’s.

Narumi’s well-made point is that with or without her sixth sense, Hibiki has formed countless bonds with people in her life, including Narumi herself, who sticks with her even though the sixth sense frightened her. Just because she may have lost that sense doesn’t mean she should give up or despair, because she remains connected to those people whose lives she touched, as well as those she can no longer see or hear.

About that…after joining hands with Narumi as she drilled this point home, the clouds broke and all of Hibiki’s ghostly friends return to her side, along with her living friends, who are glad Narumi manages to get the job done.

While the explanation for this is a bit cloudy, it would seem Hibiki’s mom returned to that spiritual realm where she watches over her daughter, and managed to revive the plant that either represents Hibiki’s life, sixth sense, or both. Meanwhile, all the ghosts completed their transition back to the living world. The whole thing, it would seem, was temporary.

But there’s nothing temporary about the effect Hibiki’s selfless, caring, kind-hearted acts has on her own life: she was never alone as she feared; her connections with the living and dead endure. It’s a triumphant scene to see such a huge ground assembled around her, and while it might have been interesting to see her accept a life without her sixth sense, I really don’t mind that she got it back, either.

The Moon Festival has come, and Hibiki is excited because her dad finally found her mother’s handmade decorations. She invites her friends to her home to decorate the tree, eat her special tamagoyaki, and write down their wishes, which she says have traditionally always come true in her family.

That’s made clear when her wish to have friends is pretty much redundant. Her other wish, written on a very old piece of paper, because it’s an old wish, is one her living friends can’t help her with…but her ghost friends believe they can: meeting her mother. It’s a perfectly normal wish for any girl who has never met her mother, yet Hibiki thinks it’s selfish. Nevertheless, RCS and Kogal travel into the spiritual plane of her mind as she sleeps to try to make it happen.

There, they find a spiritual Yuuhi, who has been watching over Hibiki her entire life through a mirror in a washitsu, and tending to a morning glory plant that is connected to Hibiki. The plant withers if Yuuhi leaves this room, which is why she’s never been able to fulfill her own wish to hold her daughter.

RCS and Kogal, along with Ero-Neko and all of Hibiki’s other ghost friends, arrive at Yuuhi’s room to take over for her temporarily so that she can see Hibiki. The scene where the mother and daughter finally meet and embrace is the most moving and powerful yet in a show that’s been full of them. Such a simple wish, fulfilled at last. As Hibiki falls asleep in her mom’s lap, her dad peeks in too, happy the two women in his life were finally able to connect.

But when Hibiki wakes up the next morning, not only is Yuuhi gone, but all the other ghosts in her life as well. It would seem that the morning glory plant represented her sixth sense, which Yuuhi had been tending all her life, and even the combined spiritual power of her friends wasn’t enough to make up for Yuuhi’s temporary absence, and the plant died.

While Hibiki has lost her sixth sense and thus all her ghostly friends, the fact remains she has a solid group of living friends. The preview for the penultimate episode hints that it will be their turn to help her get that sense back, if they can.